MONTREAL - No matter good or bad, the one certainty about life is that there is always a tomorrow. Snow falls, but then it melts. Elections are called and results are celebrated or mourned. That little Prince George is almost ready to walk, and foodies continue to stagger out of the Au Pied de Cochon Sugar Shack, clenching their stomachs in one hand, and a half dozen takeout containers in the other. Life, my friends, carries on.

While we all watch our children grow taller and our taxes increase, there, in the background, are the restaurants, chugging away doing their thing to various degrees of success. Even after we critics dissect their tasting menus down to the last mignardise, they continue serving plates to happy — or unhappy — customers. Days go by, then months and years, and those restaurants evolve either for better or, alas, for worse.

I have reviewed the downtown restaurant Decca 77 three times since it opened in 2005, awarding it three and a half stars at its peak in 2008. Under former chef Daren Bergeron, Decca 77 was a player. The menu featured first class Canadian ingredients and dishes were original. Though pricey, the wine list was impressive, with an on-site sommelier to point you in the right direction. The corridor-like room wasn’t much to write home about and the menu format was always being tweaked, no doubt to accommodate diners looking for a quick nosh pre-hockey game or concert at the Bell Centre next door. But all taken, it was always a fine-dining restaurant worth recommending.

Bergeron moved on in 2012 and news came last fall that Jean-Sébastien Giguère, the former night chef at Toqué!, would be the new captain of the Decca 77 ship. The restaurant would also now be divided into a brasserie on one side, and a fine-dining restaurant on the other. Despite positive posts last fall by bloggers invited to check out the new dishes, the Decca 77 buzz was minimal, so I booked a table at the fancy part on a recent Tuesday to check things out.

The second I was presented with the menu, I knew something was off. Not only were the yellow covers dirty, the dish descriptions were riddled with ridiculous translation errors in both languages. I cut a lot of slack to restaurants for problems like this, but when you see main course prices capping at $45, you expect a certain level of professionalism. Sadly, that mess of a menu epitomized the entire experience.

Let’s start with the waiter. Friendly enough upon arrival, his manner quickly switched to curt and indifferent at the table. What irked me the most was the way he tried to upsell us at every opportunity. When I requested wines in a certain price range, he suggested far more expensive bottles, knocking down any of the suggestions I made for cheaper selections. When I asked to speak to a sommelier, he said he was the sommelier tonight. Alright then, but when I asked for something like a riesling, he pointed me to an oaky chardonnay. What the? When I requested glasses of white wine to pair with our starters — surprise! — he showed up with the priciest available. But it was when he tried to push the $45 deer chop on my dining companion who had ordered the (already overpriced) $39 duck breast that I snapped. Saying that my friend looked like the kind of man who appreciated a good piece of red meat, the waiter did his best to steer him away from his choice. Unreal — so much so that I spoke up and said I was a woman who liked a good piece of red meat, too, why had he not recommended it to the entire table? Upselling is a bad enough practice, but that kind of stereotypical attitude made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. In 16 years of restaurant reviewing, I had yet to hear that kind of sexist sales pitch.

The food was an all-out fiasco, too. Never have I seen or tasted such amateurish dishes sold at such an exorbitant price. Take for example an appetizer described as fried monkfish filet with lemon mayonnaise. Sounds straightforward enough. Yet the dish that was served included dabs of runny lemon mayonnaise, squiggles of some dark sauce (squid ink? … reduced balsamic? … chocolate?), green beans, cherry tomatoes, chopped chives, radish bâtonnets and a sprinkling of what looked like smoked paprika. In the middle of it all was a fish finger of sorts that was overcooked, tasteless and had the texture of canned cat food. Even a commercial fish finger would have outshone this $18 mess.

Though it seemed unfathomable, the second dish was even worse. Described on the menu as a lobster salad with bone marrow and reduced balsamic vinegar ($20!), the starter that arrived featured a large marrow bone propped up with a ball of tin foil and filled with baby spinach leaves, pine nuts, frazzled Parisian mushrooms, brown cubes that tasted like cooked apple, the occasional piece of rubbery lobster and maybe one piece of marrow — the whole covered with grated cheese with balsamic syrup dribbled over top. Despite the jumble of ingredients, the end result was tasteless, making this, hands down, the worst restaurant dish that has ever passed my lips. Peering into the semi-open kitchen in the back of the room, I started to wonder whether the dishwasher was doing the cooking that night.

And the culinary catastrophes carried on with a rabbit feuilletée. Made up of a square of puff pastry topped with a pile of shaved something (I’m guessing endive), the dish featured a rich cream sauce that contained bits of tough rabbit meat, a few oyster mushrooms and a handful of chives. As for the mysteriously absent listed baby vegetables, I’m thinking the rabbit must have eaten them.

Main courses carried on in the same hopeless manner. First came a duck magret served with unpeeled chunks of Jerusalem artichoke, watery quarters of bitter pattypan squash and another handful of chopped chives. A tough braised veal shank served on a bed of rubbery gnocchi was soaked in a sweet orange-flavoured sauce covered with even more chives. But the chive festival came to its climax with the dish of ricotta and mushroom-stuffed agnolotti. Served with artichoke, rapini, cherry tomatoes and enough chives to garnish all the starter plates served in the city that night, the dish was probably the best of the meal, even if the rapini was overcooked, the sauce was oily and every single agnolotti was a different shape and size.

Desserts sealed the miserable deal. The opera cake with butterscotch ice cream was an opera cake in name only, as the dessert served was a dry white cake with chocolate cream instead of the classic layers of thin almond cake soaked in coffee syrup layered with chocolate ganache and coffee buttercream. Adorned with swirls of caramel and chocolate sauce and Crispearls (a commercial candy made by Callebaut), the cake was mysteriously paired with a strawberry sorbet. When I asked our waiter about the butterscotch ice cream, he looked confused and headed to the kitchen to inquire before coming back with a bowl of it. You can’t make up incompetence like this.

The last two desserts included another slice of dry cake covered in those chocolate beads (the sweet equivalent of those omnipresent chives?), some sort of cream, an ugly chocolate tuile and a blizzard of cocoa powder. Ugh. The final dessert featured lemon in many forms, lemon cream spilling out of stale financier cakes, a cigarette cookie filled with more lemon cream, and a lemon sorbet topped with limoncello served in a glass too narrow for our spoon. When I asked about a smaller spoon, the waiter said, “You are supposed to drink it.” Drink a ball of sorbet? We did eventually manage to get a second spoon in the glass. Problem is, we couldn’t get it out.

OK, so at this point in the review you’re probably thinking, either, “Wow, sounds terrible!” or, “Chesterman’s being mean this week.” But here’s the clincher, dear readers: The bill, with wine, tax and tip for this culinary cauchemar came to $387 for three. Considering this restaurant once pulled out a three and a half star rating, seeing it disintegrate to this level of unprofessionalism is not a disappointment. It’s a fiasco.

You can hear Lesley Chesterman on ICI Radio-Canada Première’s (95.1 FM) Médium Large Tuesdays at 10 a.m., and on CHOM (97.7 FM) Wednesdays at 7:10 a.m.

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